Project Eleven secures $20M at a $120M valuation to harden Bitcoin and crypto against post‑quantum risk

Project Eleven has closed a $20 million Series A round at a $120 million valuation to build post‑quantum security tooling for major crypto networks, including Bitcoin. The capital is aimed at a narrow but crucial goal: reduce the attack surface created by future quantum computers without breaking today’s chains or user experience.

The funding signals a pragmatic shift in how this industry is approaching quantum risk. Many teams debate timelines; fewer invest in migration mechanics. The math is largely known—lattice and hash‑based signatures are viable—yet the hard work is coordinating billions in assets, thousands of wallets, and entrenched habits. That’s the real battlefield.

The core problem isn’t just ECDSA/EdDSA becoming brittle in a high‑qubit future; it’s moving keys and state safely. Bitcoin and similar networks expose public keys on spend, leaving a visible trail for “harvest‑now, decrypt‑later” adversaries. Early P2PK outputs and reused addresses amplify that exposure. Even if a cryptographically relevant quantum machine is years out, data harvested today could be weaponized later. A credible defense starts with inventory and triage, not slogans.

Where Project Eleven could matter is in the unglamorous layers:

- Discovery and risk scoring: map UTXOs and accounts with revealed pubkeys, reused addresses, and aging scripts; rank what needs rotating first. - Automated key rotation: wallet‑level workflows that quietly migrate funds to quantum‑resilient outputs, with guardrails for fee spikes and partial migrations. - Multisig and threshold support: redesign signing flows so institutions can upgrade without disrupting governance, audits, or HSM policies. - Protocol‑aware tooling: simulate signature size, fee, and verification impacts for candidate PQC schemes; surface trade‑offs before networks debate upgrades. - Coordination rails: alerting, proofs of rotation, and standardized messages so custodians, exchanges, and wallets can synchronize changes without introducing central choke points.

The biggest friction is human, not cryptographic. Users often defer maintenance until forced, while institutions weigh operational risk over abstract threats. Tooling that reduces cognitive load—one‑click risk checks, staged migrations, reversible safeguards—has a higher chance of adoption than whitepapers alone. In my experience, custodians and market makers respond when the risk is framed as basis‑point leakage and reputational exposure, not just theoretical math.

On the business side, who pays is the lever. Exchanges and custodians face the clearest liability and could underwrite broad coverage if the tooling plugs cleanly into existing key ceremonies. Wallets will demand open standards to avoid vendor lock‑in. Developers will want verifiable, open‑source cores with commercial support on top. A credible platform will likely publish reference implementations and audits, then monetize orchestration, compliance add‑ons, and enterprise SLAs.

Technically, the migration path needs to be conservative. Larger PQC signatures affect block space, mempool policy, and verification costs; any solution that bloats fees or slows validation will meet resistance. A phased approach—starting with risk discovery and voluntary rotations using currently available script paths, then piloting PQC‑friendly constructions on testnets—lets communities build consensus before formal BIPs or soft forks are on the table. Interop with Taproot‑style constructs, PSBT flows, and hardware wallets is non‑negotiable.

There’s also a quiet equity question here. Long‑tail holders, lost‑key estates, and users who can’t easily upgrade are the ones most exposed to a late scramble. Tooling that prioritizes backwards compatibility, transparent defaults, and broad client support helps avoid a scenario where sophisticated actors migrate early while retail is left holding brittle outputs.

This raise doesn’t settle the quantum timeline debate, and it doesn’t need to. It acknowledges a narrower truth: discovery, rotation, and coordination are shippable today, and they compound. If Project Eleven turns capital into boring, robust infrastructure that wallets and institutions actually adopt, it could buy the ecosystem valuable time—and optionality—before protocol‑level decisions become unavoidable.